alt Hacker NewsThis isn't entirely accurate. Plenty of apps run Terminal commands in the background (for some reason). For example Rewind.ai (before they got acquired and installed a kill switch, Adobe Flash-style) runs `top` every two seconds, presumably to figure out its own CPU usage. What the fucking shit? But I think it's not out of the question that other apps run other crap too.
Also, if they truly didn't care about Terminal users, they would not have even published this article!!
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> This isn't entirely accurate. Plenty of apps run Terminal commands in the background (for some reason).
A lot do it because sometimes there is no convenient library wrapping what they are trying to check or execute that they are aware of, and running a cli command is generally cheap unless you are doing it in a tight loop. A lot of the time this is “it'll do until I find the right library or bindings” code that should have been fixed before release, but it isn't all as bad as running top as you describe.
> Plenty of apps run Terminal commands in the background (for some reason).
Huh, I tried to do this a long time ago and permissions bit me and I quit. I was making a nice UI that would run ffmpeg to stitch together some video files, so it would use native UI elements to pick the input files and output location, then generate the ffmpeg command and run it. It worked fine on my machine but it ran into permissions on my friend's machine who needed it and I gave up because they found something better.
They published the article for the people they care above, to make it clear to them they should not worry about all these reports about Apple being vulnerable to this issue.
> Plenty of apps run Terminal commands in the background
Most notably agents like Claude Code and Codex? Easy to check if you ask it to run: